


handover

by alittleonedge



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-23
Updated: 2018-11-23
Packaged: 2019-08-28 05:34:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16717413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alittleonedge/pseuds/alittleonedge





	handover

His hand lays heavy across her belly while she looks at him, head against the pillow and tilted to the side.

“We’ll think of something,” she says and her eyes play coy with the haughty tilt of her head.

He can feel the fluttering of her stomach beneath his hand.

He’s feeling silk, but he’s tricking himself into thinking about the feeling of well worn cotton, red, with a tie at the waist, lost in a fire. Would she think him dirty, to know that he’s thinking about how she’s just as small, just as beautiful, and how he regrets not turning to face her sooner when she laid on his motel room bed as he poured his life’s regret into the still air. He would have liked to burn the image of her young face with her frizzy hair into his frontal lobe. He would have liked to kiss her. He never would have. He needed to wait. 

He slides his other arm from beneath her and tucks his elbow in between the bed and his body so he can really see her. Now her eyes cast up and the coyness is gone. She looks innocent, like she hadn’t just suggested anything, and yet her chest heaves once with anticipatory breath.

His fingers wiggle under the sheet.

He’s thinking of those wide eyes in a hospital bed, cheeks newly pinkened from revived life, revived hydration, and the burning embarrassment of a dumb partner who brought her the lamest tape—Superstars of the Super Bowl—to her recovering bedside. He’d wanted to stay longer, to stay late into the night and make her laugh with his croaky singalongs. But he had a hard time meeting her mother’s and sister’s eyes. And it would take him a while to confidently meet hers and hold them. 

He watches her. He can smell her sleepy breath and the perfume left over from the day. He can see every beautiful line in her face, the gold glint of her cross laying on her throat. She tilts her head further back and he can feel the air flowing from her parted lips.

His hand finds the split in the black ensemble she’s worn to him and slips inside.

There’s a wisp of hair curling around her temple that jerks his mind back to a time when the rest of her hair flipped and flopped the same way, matching the movie star curve of her upper lip. She had the most Hollywood glamour he’s ever seen for someone who so wasn’t Hollywood, reminding him in the passenger seat of a rental car how she felt about kennels for the moppy little mutt in the back seat. She’s changed a little now, spoiled herself a little more. He likes that she’s found a balance; her silk pajamas, her expensive suits and perfume, with her penchant for Waffle Houses and dogs no one else will love. And that same damn face that puts the silver screen industry to shame. 

Her skin is cooler than his hand and he warms it with his palm. The muscles there quiver and her breathing is uneven. He supposes that if he let himself breathe at a normal rate, it would be uneven too. But he holds his breath and then lets it out quietly, trying to keep his heartbeat tamed.

His hand slides between her hip bones.

He didn’t know what he would have done if he had never seen soft lounging pants slung low around those hips. He missed it the first time while some creep, face changing, superstar wanna-be slime ball sat on her couch and looked at her with his eyes. But then again, he was just glad she was there, to see her place her hands on her hips and live to argue with him another year more. To live to embrace the stripes that vined between the peak of one hip bone to the other. 

Her body arches to him, almost imperceptibly, and she holds her eyes on his. He isn’t sure if either one of them have blinked in the past minute, but he doesn’t plan on missing a second of her face. She lifts her head a little, presumably to kiss him after torturous minutes of not kissing, but he holds back.

His hand turns to point down her body and he reaches for elastic that isn’t there.

He’d let go of her hand and left her in that hospital bed, in that pink hospital gown, smelling like the sterility of fluorescent lights, his mind yelling at him all day long Scully, hospital, Scully, hospital. He’d had to go. But even when he didn’t have to go, didn’t have to go check out some tree creature, he’d left her in his motel room with mini bottles of champagne, and cheese. He’d been scared that if he didn’t leave, she would. As if choosing her would convince the universe to finally take her away. And she’d forgiven him, held him in a forest, and saved him again. Maybe he should have kissed her then, but he would keep waiting.

They are good at waiting. She still hasn’t said anything, but neither has he, and he is caught between surprise and total unsurprise. He’s more surprised to find absurdly smooth skin on either side of wiry curls under his fingertips. His lips quirk in the smallest smile as he silently asks her if she lost the battle with herself about going and paying for waxes. Her eyes only beg for mercy—just a little bit.

He palms her with his middle finger tucked between her lips.

He’d almost kissed her when she pressed her back to him, under bright flood lights and a sky full of stars, in that suede jacket she spent months paying off a credit card for, and told him to shut up. With the excuse of a baseball bat, he’d held her in his arms, breathed in her hair, and got close enough to the sweet skin on her neck that he began tasting it on the back of his tongue with every inhale. Back then it was hips before hands. Now it’s hands below hips. Still no kiss.

His fingertip is present for her opening pushing out and then bearing down, and he is present for her mouth dropping open more. He’s close enough to see her pupils dilate and he is forced to empty his lungs and take an uneasy breath. His forehead drops to hers and he’s risking pain in his strained eyes to keep looking. 

He sinks his finger into her and curls.

She could fall asleep anywhere mid-sentence, but that time, she had done it on his couch. He wondered if when she was sleeping, if the universe was paying attention. He took a chance and pushed her hair behind her ear, pulled a blanket over her body. He picked up their tea mugs and put her shoes by the door. Later, when he sat next to her and mirrored her position, she had opened her eyes. She looked at him like she couldn’t believe he was there. Her hand crept out from the blanket and reached for his, pulling it back under the blanket to rest on her chest, then pushed it down over her breast, down over her torso, down to between her legs as she uncrossed her ankles on the coffee table.

Does she remember the way he’d first slipped two fingers into her like he does right now. Does she remember the way he’d let her body heat up under the blanket and the way she arched her back the same way she is right now. Her whispering breaths are bordering whimpers with each pump and bend of his knuckles. His forehead rocks against hers.

He holds still inside her and presses up hard with the pads of his fingers. 

He had found himself the winner of some unusual fantasies when he’d settled into the acceptance of their child swimming around in her. God she had been so gorgeous and ripe with life and vitality, with fire, and heat that dripped down her back. There was an eroticism in knowing that parts of them had remained combined, even when he was gone, and were still so, even as he joined them again. He’d nuzzled her many afternoons, just inhaling and working into a frenzy of tasting and touching. She’d joked with him that he was having sympathy hormones, getting high on her pheromones. He’d only shrugged and thumbed a sensitive nipple, tasting the hot flash on her neck, asking if she wanted him as badly as he needed her.

Her body is lush and wet and when she squeezes around his fingers he moves them in and out just an inch, burning friction along the tight ring of muscle. She’s having a hard time forming breath or sounds, instead gasping and gripping his wrist with both of her hands. Her eyebrows are pulled together by the pleasure pain of him working her over and he grazes his nose over hers, their lips so close, her eyes so desperate in their need for him to look back, to make promises to her that she doesn’t need him to say out loud.

His fingertips stroke a rough patch inside her and wetness starts to slip down his palm.

She looked at him that way in the car for hours after she’d helped him escape prison. Until she fell asleep with her head turned toward him, hair falling in her face. When she first got time alone with him, she’d wanted him to rip open every piece of clothing she had on, had wanted him to bite her and to bite him back. But he wouldn’t. From the moment she’d stepped into his cell, he had taken her hand in his and pressed his lips to her fingers, bound and determined to be the gentleness that the world hadn’t been for her. And later, when she thrashed and cried for him, he had stilled her and breathed he loved her and touched her with aching tenderness.

His arm slides from under the weight of his body and just under her shoulder, his hand going up the back of her neck and into her hair, cradling her. He tugs and her head falls back more. He hovers over her, his hardness now pressing into her side, his leg falling between hers that are spread wide beneath the sheet. He kisses the wrinkle between her eyebrows and she sighs.

His thumb finds her clit and he pulls her hair until she moans toward his mouth. 

Her hair had gotten so long, seemingly out of nowhere, when he watched her walk up the steps of the house they had picked out together. It was mostly his idea, insisting that they be a long drive from anyone or any thing. But she had insisted on the place with the cute front porch. He had walked behind her, watching eight o’clock summer sun shimmer in the long braid down her back. Catching up, he pulled the elastic from the end and tousled her hair free. She turned, and her hair waved and crimped over her freckled shoulders. She pouted and playfully lifted her eyes. He kissed her with her copper strands in fistfuls.

His open mouth is filling with her exhales, his top lip barely brushing hers as she lets sounds slide from her throat. His tongue slips out to run along the starlet curve of her upper lip and into the corner of her mouth. He feels hers immediately and they move together with greedy groans. She kisses him like she believes his theories. She kisses him like she loves him.

He lets up on her lips and doubles down with his hand until she comes, nails digging into his forearm.

He sees the next twenty fives years.


End file.
